The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

Barrett Brown

A Visit to the Sweat Lodge and Santa Muerte, Full of Grace and Stop Sending me Jonathan Franzen Novels

A Visit to the Sweat Lodge

Back in the go-go days of 2011 I got into some sort of post-modern running conflict with a certain declining superpower that shall remain nameless and shortly afterwards found myself in jail awaiting trial on seventeen federal criminal counts carrying a combined maximum sentence of 105 years in prison. Luckily I got off with just 63 months, which here in the Republic of Crazyland is actually not too bad of an outcome.

The surreal details of the case itself may be found in any number of mainstream and not-so-mainstream news articles, from which you will learn that I was the official spokesman for Anonymous, or perhaps the unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, or maybe simply the self-proclaimed spokesman for Anonymous, or alternatively the guy who denied being the spokesman for Anonymous over and over again, sometimes on national television to no apparent effect. You’ll also find that I was either a conventional journalist, an unconventional journalist, a satirist who despised all journalists, an activist, a whistleblower, a nihilistic and self-absorbed cyberpunk adventurer out to make a name for himself, or “an underground commander in a new kind of war,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, no doubt exaggerating.

According to the few FBI files that the bureau has thus far made public, I’m a militant anarchist revolutionary who once teamed up with Anonymous in an attempt to “overthrow the U.S. government,” and on another, presumably separate occasion, I plotted unspecified “attacks” on the government of Bahrain, which, if true, would really seem to be between me and the king of Bahrain, would it not? There’s also a book out there that claims I’m from Houston, whereas in fact I spit on Houston. As to the truth on these and other matters, I’m going to play coy for now, as whatever else I may be, I’m definitely something of a coquette. All you really need to know for the purposes of this column is that I’m some sort of eccentric writer who lives in a prison, and I may or may not have it out for the king of Bahrain.

Over the last couple of years of incarceration, I’ve had ever so many exciting adventures, some of which I’ve detailed in the prior incarnation of this column, “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” I’ve watched two inmates get into a blood-spattered fight over the right to sell homemade pies from a particular table. I have participated in an unauthorized demonstration against an abusive guard and been thrown into the hole as a suspected instigator. I’ve shouted out comical revolutionary slogans while my Muslim cellmate flooded our tiny punishment cell in order to get back at the officers who’d taken his Ramadan meal during a search. I’ve found myself with nothing better to read than an autobiography by Wendy’s Old-Fashioned Hamburgers founder Dave Thomas, and read it, and found it wanting.

I’ve stalked a fellow inmate who talks nonsense to himself all day due to having never come down after a PCP trip, suspecting that he might say something really weird that I could compare and contrast with the strange William Blake poems I’d been reading and thought this might be a funny idea for an article, and I was right, so do not ask me to apologize for this, for I shall not. I’ve been extracted from my cell by a dozen guards and shipped to another jail thirty miles away after the administration decided I was too much trouble. I’ve spent one whole year receiving sandwiches for dinner each night, but the joke’s on them because I love sandwiches.

I’ve read through an entire sixteenth-century volume on alchemy out of pure spite. I’ve added the word “Story” to the end of every instance of prison graffiti reading “West Side” that I’ve come across thus far. I’ve conceived the idea of writing a sequel to the Ramayana but abandoned the project after determining that the world is not prepared for such a thing. I’ve been subjected to a gag order at the request of the prosecution on the grounds that the latest Guardian article I’d written from jail had been “critical of the government.” I’ve learned all sorts of neat convict tricks like making dice out of toilet paper, popping locks on old cell doors, and appreciating mediocre rap. I’ve managed to refrain from getting any ironic prison tattoos and feel about 65 percent certain that I’ll be able to hold out for the two years left in my sentence. And I’ve read Robert Caro’s four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson over the course of a month, in the process becoming something of a minor god, beyond good and evil, unfazed by man’s wickedness.

After being sentenced last January I released a statement reading:

Good News!—The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. Wish me luck!

In fact I had no intention of doing anything of the kind; it was merely the same manner of idle bluster that I’ve been putting out to the press for years now because I’m a braggart. Actually I was hoping to just sort of relax and maybe catch up on my plotting. But a month later, when I arrived at the Fort Worth Correctional Institution to serve the remainder of my sentence, the place turned out to be an unspoiled journalistic paradise of poorly concealed government corruption and hamfisted cover-ups. Even so, I was still reluctant to grab at even this low-hanging fruit. I’d spent the eighteen months prior to my arrest overseeing a crowd-sourced investigation into that aforementioned “cyber-industrial complex,” a subject which, although important, I also happen to find personally distasteful; the research end involved going through tens of thousands of e-mails stolen by Anonymous from the toy-fascist government desk-spies and jumped-up quasi-literate corporate technicians to whom the American “citizenry” have accidentally granted jus primae noctis over several Constitutional amendments. I hate all this computer shit and was actually a little relieved when the FBI finally took me down, thereby sparing me from the obligation to read another million words of e-Morlock jibber-jabber about Romas/COIN and Odyssey and persona management and whatever else the public is just going to end up ignoring until it’s too late anyway.

So I was disinclined to sully the rest of my incarceration vacation by having to memorize a book of Bureau of Prisons policies and court rulings on due process rights for inmates to see which ones are being routinely violated by the prison administration, and then run around secretly interviewing inmates and getting copies of receipts and making Freedom of Information requests and all that. After all, there already exists here a clandestine network of inmates who do all of this and more and who routinely make significant discoveries ranging from procedural violations to outright criminal conduct by staff and administrators—and, naturally, all of these documented revelations are generally ignored by the incompetent regional reporters to whom the inmates occasionally send such materials. As I happen to know some of the 3 or 4 percent of U.S. journalists and editors who are capable of doing their jobs, I figured I’d just hook one of them up with the prisoner in question, hope that some instance of wrongdoing gets exposed in print, take more than my share of the credit, put out a victory statement reading, “No one imprisons Barrett Brown and gets away with it! Mwah ha ha!!” or something to that effect, and then spend the rest of my sentence doing whatever it is that I do for recreation.

In late March I put my awesome plan in motion, using the inmate e-mail system to follow up with a journalist I’d provided with contact info for one of the inmate researchers and reiterating that the fellow had documented evidence of corruption within the Bureau of Prisons. Then, an hour later, my e-mail was cut off. After a couple of days of inquiry I was pulled aside by the resident head of security, a D.C. liaison by the name of Terrance Moore, who told me he’d been the one to cut off my e-mail access, as I’d been “using it for the wrong thing,” which he clarified to mean talking to the press. When I sought to challenge this plainly illegal move by turning in the BP-9 form to begin the Administrative Remedy process that inmates are required to exhaust before suing the federal official who’s violated their right to due process under what’s known as a Bivens claim, the prison’s Administrative Remedy coordinator simply failed to log it into the system for over a month, finally doing so only after the matter had been brought to the attention of the press; finally, on June 4 he deigned to register receipt of the BP-9, thereby belatedly starting the clock on the twenty days the prison is allotted in which to address one’s grievance—and then he failed to respond even by that illicitly extended deadline.

I’ve since learned that this sort of thing is common here and that in fact I was lucky to get my grievance officially acknowledged as received at all; I’ve seen copies of forms that have yet to be logged five months after being turned in to the unit staff. That would be problematic enough anywhere as it constitutes denial of access to the courts. But it’s especially despicable at an institution like this, which includes a medical unit for inmates who require ongoing treatment—because to the extent that they don’t actually receive that treatment, the only recourse is to pursue the Remedy process so that their complaints won’t simply be tossed out of court on the grounds that they’ve “failed to exhaust” that process before going to the judge. I’ve included copies of the relevant documents in prior columns and will continue to provide updates as I take my case to the regional office, the national office, and finally to the courts, as of course it will be interesting to see whether or not the BOP takes due process seriously or, barring that, is at least willing to buy me off with a carton of Marlboros.

In the meantime, I continue to have neat adventures. Last month one of the American Indian inmates invited me to attend their weekly sweat lodge ceremony, which is held in a fenced-off area that each federal prison is required to provide for ritual use by the Natives. The next morning I showed up at the appointed time and, having determined that it wasn’t an ambush, I began helping the twenty or so resident Indians break up tree branches for fire kindling, something I did very much with the air of a five-year-old who believes himself to be “helping Daddy.” Next we built a large bonfire (I assisted by staying out the way and being good) by which to heat up several dozen large rocks that would be used for “the sweat.” The fire-making process was expedited by strategically placed crumpled-up sheets of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which I gather is not a strictly traditional aspect of most shamanistic ceremonies. As if to acknowledge this, one of the Indians declared, “The one good thing the white man ever did was invent paper.” Naturally all eyes were on me, and I knew that this might be my only chance to win them over. “We didn’t invent it,” I blurted out. “We just stole it from the Chinese.” This produced appreciative chuckles all around. “I got a laugh out of the Indians!” I thought exultantly, my triumph so complete that I was unbothered by the fact that what I’d said wasn’t really true.

By and by we crawled into the lodge, a wood-and-canvas structure with a dirt floor, in the middle of which had been dug a pit to hold the heated rocks that would be providing the extraordinary heat we would need to sweat out our sins. The flap was then closed from the outside, leaving us in perfect darkness, and thereafter began the first of the fifteen-minute “rounds” of the sweat ceremony, which consisted of all manner of tribal songs, entreaties to the spirits, and sometimes just discussions and announcements. At one point my sponsor, a Lakota, declared that although superficially white, I might nonetheless have an “Indian spirit.” It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said about me, this polite supposition that I might not really be descended from the fair-skinned race of marauding, treaty-breaking slavers whose Novus Ordo Seclorum had been built on a foundation of genocide. But insomuch as I’d spent the bulk of the ceremony not in prayer, but rather in a state of neurotic concern over whether or not my self-deprecating comment from an hour earlier about whites stealing paper could have perhaps been a bit more crisply phrased, I’m afraid my spirit would seem to be Anglo-Saxon after all.

Although undeniably majestic, the ceremony was also something of a disappointment. I had gone into the thing hoping that I might mysteriously know exactly what to do—how to pass the peace pipe and all that—and maybe even start singing old Cherokee songs that the eldest of those present would barely recall having heard from their own grandfathers. Stunned, the Indians would collectively intone, “He shall know your ways as if born to them,” this being the ancient prophecy I had thereby fulfilled, and then I would unite the tribes under my banner and lead the foremost of their warriors on a jihad against our shared enemies, as Paul Muad’Dib did. Instead, the Indians had to remind me several times not to just stand up and start walking around during the ceremony.

I’m currently in the midst of another adventure, having been placed back in the hole two weeks ago after a suspicious incident in which staff singled me out for a search of my locker and found a cup of homemade alcohol, or “hooch.” Next time, then, we’ll take a look at life here in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, as the hole is more formally known, and where I expect to spend some forty-five days. And when I get back, there better not be any more Republican presidential primary contenders. You don’t need three dozen slightly different variations on right-Hegelian nationalist populism from which to choose. That’s just excessive.

Santa Muerte, Full of Grace

Last time I mentioned that I’d been thrown into the hole, otherwise known as the Special Housing Unit (SHU), after a “random” breathalyzer test that I passed was nonetheless followed by a “random” targeted search of my locker, not unlike the “random” drug test for which I just happened to be selected out of 350 inmates in my unit a few months back, shortly after filing a complaint against prison officials regarding—wait for it—retaliation. In fairness, they did find a cup of homemade alcohol in my locker this time, the clever rascals, but I was only going to use it to drink a toast to the Bureau of Prisons and wish the agency luck in defending itself against the various lawsuits that have been filed against it lately. Also I wanted to look cool in front of the bigger kids.

Getting put back in Disciplinary Segregation was actually in some ways fortuitous as I’m now able to make a long-overdue inspection tour of this institution’s Special Housing Unit. (I’m very much the Eleanor Roosevelt of the federal prison system.) The timing is grand, too, as the nation’s tendency to keep prisoners in these sorts of twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown settings for no good reason has come under a rare spate of scrutiny in recent months. But going to the hole isn’t all champagne and roses. By policy, one doesn’t receive one’s property, including legal papers, until after two weeks of confinement. And by negligence, one is usually left without one’s prescribed medications for at least three or four days. Bizarrely enough, there was also a shortage of the little pencils we’re supposed to receive upon arrival, and so it took me a while to get one of my very own. And after over a month of confinement, despite countless requests to the ranking lieutenant, I’ve still yet to receive a high-end gaming laptop loaded with a Super Nintendo emulator, a complete set of Super Nintendo ROMs, and the latest stable release of Dwarf Fortress, although I guess I can see how this might be regarded as a not altogether reasonable demand.

But the most jarring aspect of going to the hole is always that period between arrival and the point at which one is able to get one’s hands on a worthwhile book. Some previous occupant had left a couple of paperbacks in my cell, one of which was an early-nineties thriller called The Mafia Candidate in which a major presidential contender turns out to be a tool of the mafia and not of Northrop Grumman or Booz Allen Hamilton or Lockheed Martin or Bell Helicopter or Kellogg Brown & Root, like the more respectable candidates. As the story begins, an undercover FBI agent joins some suspected drug runners on a Caribbean yacht cruise in order to gather evidence, rather than simply lying to a grand jury to obtain a warrant like a real FBI agent would do. Alas, the narc’s cover is blown and he’s held at gunpoint by the mob henchmen. “If this were an Indiana Jones movie, he might throw himself to the floor and roll under the table while all these guys with cannons blazed away at each other,” explains the author. “But this wasn’t the movies and things like that didn’t happen in real life. Or real death, either.”

• • •

Proud though I was at having discovered the worst line ever written, I was now in full-on lit-crit final form blood frenzy battle mode, and so instead of resting on my snide and pompous laurels, I went ahead and picked up the other paperback. This was Holiday in Death by Nora Roberts, a contemptible writer who appears to have amassed an unwarranted fortune for herself and her foul publishers by catering to the gauche sexual fantasies of the American soccer mom, cursed among demographics. Having already written every possible combination of English words that can be jammed into a conventional 300-page romance novel and having thereby churned out some 900 trillion best-sellers, this arch-priestess of darkness next saw fit to concoct an entirely new genre, “futuristic romantic suspense,” of which this Holiday title is listed as being just one of two dozen in a series.

The setting: New York, 2043. The hero: a female cop who just happens to be married to THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO IS ALSO RUGGEDLY HANDSOME. As the story begins, our pig protagonist is feeling sad because THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO IS ALSO RUGGEDLY HANDSOME is on a business trip to space, presumably to attend the ribbon cutting for the Palantir-Pentagon Joint Orbital Omniscience Satellite Array or something of that nature. But then he picks up the space phone and makes a space call to tell his jack-booted thug-get that he’s coming home early because he just misses her so much. So he heads back to Earth, perhaps catching a space ride on one of Elon Musk’s space yachts along with Palantir chief Peter Thiel and the biomechanical meta-clone of Admiral Poindexter that serves as Thiel’s handler. (I should probably explain that I spent a pleasant afternoon creating a dystopian geopolitical backstory for Roberts’ setting whereby the United States and its client states have fallen under the dual control of DARPA’s Office of Perpetual Data Supremacy and the Shadow Council of Misguided Tech Billionaires. I wish I could say that this took a great deal of imagination.) When he gets home he takes his little cop wife by the hand, and what do you suppose he tells her? He tells her this: “The wanting of you never stops.” Rather than do the only decent thing by shooting him in the back and casually tossing her taser next to the body in support of a falsified police report, this wanton cop-tart actually responds positively to her space husband’s deranged and overwritten declaration of space lust. There follows what is likely intended to be a sex scene, though it’s all rather abstract so they might just be doing tai chi in a humid room.

Among the various tacked-on elements by which Roberts occasionally sees fit to remind us that this is the future, a list of the contents of someone’s apartment will usually include an “entertainment unit” or some such thing. Science fiction authors have been pulling this shit for literally eighty years now, sprinkling their projected futures with “comm units” and “food preparation units” and whatnot. It’s time to accept that no one is ever going to market their consumer appliance as any sort of “unit.” Things like that don’t happen in real life. OR REAL DEATH, EITHER.

• • •

Anyhoo, I spent much of the first couple of days talking to my cellmate. (Note that a stint in the hole doesn’t necessarily entail solitary confinement, which is not always viable due to overcrowding.) As far as SHU cellmates go, it would be hard to top the one with whom I was initially placed last time I was thrown into the hole a year ago, after allegedly inciting a demonstration: a white, red-bearded Texas Muslim with the words “Death Rain Upon My Enemies” tattooed across his back in Arabic, and who, when asked by a staff officer if he had anything to say to the disciplinary committee in his own defense, quoted Saddam Hussein’s reply from his war crimes trial that he did not recognize the authority of their court, and who enjoyed not only gangsta rap and PCP but also the work of Phil Collins and, I swear to God, Oscar Wilde. I wrote two whole columns about this guy and was crestfallen when he was shipped off to the maximum-security prison which he has no doubt since claimed as a province of Islamic State. Indeed, the truly heartbreaking thing about federal prison is the absence of video cameras by which to fully document the almost supernaturally bizarre array of people that the FBI has managed to bring together.

To give you a better sense of this, my new cellmate here in the SHU snuck over to Dallas from Mexico when he was fifteen, became the leader of a gang, did a year in state prison for shooting another drug dealer with a shotgun, sometimes consulted a local television psychic called Indio Apache for intel by which to better plot his criminal strategy, and worships Santa Muerte, the skeletal narco-deity beloved throughout the Mexican underworld. He has three kids, is currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for conspiring to distribute methamphetamines, is listed on his indictment as having seven different aliases, and is, he tells me, “almost twenty years old.” In the federal system, this qualifies him as a moderately interesting person. And, yes, here in Texas dealing meth is fifteen times more serious than shooting someone with a shotgun.

Panchito Villa, as I’ll call him, is actually a very good cellmate. For one thing, he gives me the bread from our food trays, which is a big deal here in the SHU where one can’t get commissary, and particularly at this prison, where the rations have been inexplicably reduced over the last two years. Apparently his old boxing coach weaned him off bread products during training and the lesson stuck. Also he drew some very impressive decorations on our cell wall, including a life-size depiction of what would appear to be Princess Zelda wearing a handkerchief over her lower face gangster-style and sporting the tag “Vata Loca” tattooed above her eyes.

One morning, the two of us discussed the possibility that, this being Wednesday, which is hamburger day, our lunch might perhaps include potato wedges—a relatively beloved dish that the prison manages to provide once or twice a month—instead of the potato chips that it pawns off on us more often than not. Panchito knelt before the photograph of a robed skeleton that serves as a makeshift shrine to Santa Muerte and prayed to her on our behalf, asking that she intercede in this matter. An hour later, we received our hamburgers accompanied by potato wedges, and afterwards Panchito led me in a Spanish prayer of thanksgiving to our benefactress. The sad thing is that, given the alternative explanation is that the prison administration decided to feed us a sufficient lunch in accordance with the national standards, and given how rarely this actually ends up happening on any given day under the reign of our jerk-off warden, Rodney Chandler, and also taking into account what I’ve already documented in prior columns regarding this prison’s ongoing failure to meet a whole range of such standards on everything from hygiene to due process, there’s a better than even chance that it really was Santa Muerte who got us the fucking potato wedges.

On a day when we happened to receive cornbread with our dinner, Panchito handed it over to me as usual.

“Are you sure you don’t want this?” I asked. “I think cornbread isn’t as bad for you.”

“I don’t want to risk it,” replied the shotgun-wielding child soldier who makes pacts with demons for potato wedges.

• • •

Shortly after arrival I received my incident report in which the “reporting officer” relates, with some apparent effort: “ON JUNE 17 2015 AT APPROXIMATE 8:35 PM DURING A RANDOM BREATHALYZER TEST I DECIDED TO SEARCH INMATES BROWN 45057-177 LOCKER AND FOUND A COFFEE MUG FULL OF PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT. OPERATION LT WAS INFORMED AND INMATE BROWN #45047-177 WAS ESCORTED BY THE COMPOUNP OFFICER TO THE SHU.” How it was that the benighted man-child should have been taken by a sudden fancy to search, er, “INMATES BROWN #45047-177 LOCKER” in the midst of a “RANDOM BREATHALYZER TEST” that I passed is left to the imagination. Luckily I received a gratuitous confirmation that this account was nonsense a few days later, when a Special Investigations Service officer by the name of McClinton came by the hole to give me yet another drug test and to brag about how they knew the hooch was in my locker due to the informants they have watching me. That just leaves the mystery of how the reporting officer managed to render “compound” as “compounp.” And if anyone out there is having trouble deciding on a name for their ska band, you could do worse than “PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT.”

There’ve also been some exciting new developments in my ongoing quest to get the BOP to explain why its D.C. liaison, Terrance Moore, switched off my ability to e-mail the public an hour after I used it to contact a journalist about wrongdoing by bureau employees. Recall that the Administrative Remedy coordinator, a fellow named McKinney, fraudulently back-dated receipt of my original complaint about this to indicate that he received it on June 4, when in fact his office received it on April 30. Then, he failed to reply within the allotted twenty days of his make-believe date of receipt (and likewise missed his other self-declared deadline of June 29 for my second complaint regarding his failure to follow procedure on my first complaint, by golly!). According to the BOP’s own guidelines, I’m permitted to take this failure to respond as a refusal of my claim, thereby finally allowing me to file a BP-10 form, which goes to the regional office. But—hark!—on June 30, McKinney belatedly filed for extensions on the illicit deadlines that he’d already missed, giving himself twenty more days to respond to both complaints. And then he missed his fake deadlines, too.

Meanwhile, the prison has failed to inform me immediately and in writing of the various media interview requests I’ve been receiving, as policy requires it to; actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter has even sent his latest application via certified mail, to no effect. It also turns out that I’m on the BOP’s Central Inmate Monitoring system, billed in a BOP program statement as being used for prisoners who “present special needs for management,” which is one way of putting it. Naturally, they’ve failed to “ensure that the affected inmate is notified in writing as promptly as possible of the classification and the basis for it,” as is also required by policy. On a totally unrelated subject, I was sentenced recently to another thirty days in the hole beyond the month I’d already done, plus ninety days of phone, commissary, visiting and e-mail restriction, which will certainly teach me to break BOP rules without first getting a job with the BOP.

Luckily I’ve gotten lots of nifty books in the mail from supporters, including The Muqaddimah, the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun’s treatise on world history. Early on, Khaldun presents us with an example of an old story he deems unreliable: “Sea monsters prevented Alexander from building Alexandria. He took a wooden container in which a glass box was inserted, and dived in it to the bottom of the sea. Then he drew pictures of the devilish monsters he saw. He then had metal effigies of these animals made and set them opposite the place where building was going on. When the monsters came out and saw the effigies, they fled.” Ibn Killjoy goes out of his way to discredit this charming tale: “Now, rulers would not take such a risk. Any ruler who would attempt such a thing would work his own undoing and provoke the outbreak of revolt against himself, and be replaced by the people with someone else…. Furthermore, the jinn are not known to have specific forms and effigies. They are able to take on various forms.” Whatever, asshole.

Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels

As I not only live in a federal prison but am also currently being held once again in a twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown punishment cell due to my incorrigible behavior, I haven’t been in a position to directly follow what I gather has been a very edifying net-driven controversy over Jonathan Franzen and his latest work, which really feels like another punishment in and of itself. Thankfully, though, I’ve received a couple of representative clippings in the mail, along with a copy of the book in question, Purity, which I’ve been asked to review.

Two things bear noting in the interest of full disclosure. First, this book revolves in part around the amoral antics of a character based rather closely on Julian Assange, while separately including references to Assange himself, most of them critical. I happen to have been an early and rabid partisan of Assange, and the two of us sometimes say nice things about each other in the press. Meanwhile, the criminal charges on which I’ve been imprisoned center on my fairly peripheral involvement in a 2011 raid by certain anarchist hackers of my acquaintance on the State Department–linked corporate espionage firm Stratfor, the stolen e-mails from which were provided to WikiLeaks. Second, and more to the point, I despise contemporary fiction almost as much as Jonathan Franzen despises women. In my view, the novel peaked with Dostoyevsky, and although I do admire, for instance, Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and Burgess’s Earthly Powers, you’ll note that the most recent of these was published almost thirty years ago. Now, I don’t doubt that some worthwhile works of “serious” fiction are still being put out now and again, but I wouldn’t know how to go about finding them, as many of our nation’s respectable outlets have apparently resorted to just hiring crazy people off the street to do their book reviews.

I have here, for instance, a copy of Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin’s recent review of Purity. This is just as well, as I needed a refresher on my Franzen lore, and Ulin opens with that very thing before promptly descending into some sort of fugue state. Naturally I was aware of the existence of The Corrections, which, Ulin reminds us, was “his masterful 2001 portrait of a Midwestern family,” but I seem to have entirely missed the more recent Freedom, “a moving meditation on marriage and friendship.” Nor was I aware that the author himself had reached the dual status of “both avatar and scapegoat.” As Ulin explains, “By now, Franzen is often regarded less as writer than as cultural signifier, emblem of white male hegemony. That this has little if anything to do with the substance of his novels is (perhaps) the point and the tragedy; when it comes to Franzen, the writing is where we go last.”

“Tragedy” may be a bit melodramatic in this instance (although it is indeed distressing to learn that the venerable old White Male Hegemony is now being fronted by Jonathan Franzen; we seem to have taken something of a plunge since Winston Churchill). After all, Ulin himself here admits that “that depth, that texture,” which is said to mark the characterization in The Corrections, “can be elusive in Purity, which is a more plotted novel, sometimes to its detriment.” And plotting, he concedes, “has never been the author’s strong suit.” Perhaps there’s a good reason why the writing is where we go last? But no—Ulin still maintains that our timely reading of this poorly plotted novel filled with low-resolution automatons is our only chance of averting tragedy because the writing itself is just that good. As proof, he actually cites the following snippet of monologue as delivered by a character named Tom:

“Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married,” he tells us in the book’s one extended first-person sequence. “Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is your capacity to be hurt by her.”

That’s fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we must all come to terms.

Setting aside this sprinkling of third-tier lit-crit commonplaces that I blush even to reproduce, it’s unclear to me exactly what “fierce” is supposed to mean in this context, although I can tell that the term is here being misapplied since it appears to be intended as a compliment. And though the passage itself isn’t especially awful, it’s alarming to be tasked with reading a 500-page tome in which that sort of overwrought prose is supposed to make up for bad plotting and notso-hotso characterization. It’s also quite telling that Ulin manages to get his favorite passage wrong; the end of the selection actually reads, “her capacity to be hurt by you,” not “your capacity to be hurt by her,” and directly follows a key plot point that makes the distinction quite clear. But then, as the fellow said himself, the writing is where we go last. Shed we a tear for Franzen? Nay—shed we a tear for us all!

• • •

When I finally did get around to going to the writing last, I was relieved to find that Purity isn’t a terrible book or even a very bad one. There is some clever use of language once in a while, yet Franzen resists the temptation to dip into the self-conscious attempts at “literary” phrasing that mark so much of his competition (our friend Ulin mentions that Franzen penned a 1996 Harper’s essay on the state of fiction, inevitably titled “Perchance to Dream”; one might be better served in reading a piece The Atlantic ran a few years later, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” in which someone named B. R. Myers points out that a great portion of modern prose styling is conceptually fraudulent garbage). Characters will sometimes think clever thoughts or even say them out loud, but not so often that this becomes unseemly. Now and again we are even presented with snippets of real insight. One can see how Franzen could have written a much better book fifteen years ago.

But one can also see how that book might have been a fluke. In Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating fifty-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.

It’s worth reiterating, though, that this sort of subject matter is not my cup of tea to begin with, and I certainly don’t want anyone to refrain from reading a novel that might interest them simply because I said mean things about it. If you’re up for a “moving meditation on marriage and friendship,” then you should probably read Freedom over and over again until your eyes bleed. If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing, then you’d better get your ass over to the nearest book store and pick up a copy of Purity. You need not worry about what I think. But if you’re curious anyway, what I think is that I hate you.

• • •

Just kidding. Ah, but there is indeed a major plot element interwoven into Purity that should be of interest to someone like me—that of Franzen’s ersatz Assange, Andreas Wolf, and his leak-driven Sunshine Project. Let me put it this way. I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.

There are big ideas here, but none worth having, much less writing down. One big idea seems to be that Julian Assange has blood on his hands. Not even the Pentagon makes this charge anymore, but it’s nonetheless raised almost in passing in an Oakland anarchist squat, of all places, by a transient Occupy activist, of all people, who proclaims: “But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki,” an assertion that goes unchallenged. To be sure, this is a bit character talking, rather than one of a handful of main characters whom we can be certain are speaking for Franzen when they start denouncing the Internet or women, but again, it sounds about as natural coming from a slum-dwelling anarcho-what-have-you as a declaration to the effect that the Multinational Imperialist State of Amerikkka must be brought to its knees by a reenergized Situationist International movement would sound coming from Mike Rogers. This, then, is the author speaking.

Not content to present discredited five-year-old anti-Assange Department of Defense talking points as if they were accepted facts even among Assange’s own ideological constituents, Franzen has, again, also created this Andreas Wolf figure, unmistakably modeled on Assange—he’s even escaped to a friendly South American country, as the real Assange is trying to do, and like Assange, he’s in the habit of deploying a rather striking female emissary on secret missions around the world. And naturally, Franzen has made Wolf a near-sociopathic fraud, murderer, and cover-up artist who also has weird sexual hang-ups (although it’s worth noting that most everyone in Purity has weird sexual hang-ups; one young lady can only achieve climax during a full moon, but then you know how feminists are). What’s particularly interesting is the sort of cluttered presence of both the model of the real figure and the real figure himself, whereas generally a writer will content himself with one of the two. Do the inhabitants of this fictional world ever get suspicious, I wonder, concluding as they must that one of the two global celebrity leakers is clearly an unfair literary depiction of the other? Do they also notice that all of their mothers are psychotic and that their marriages tend to slowly collapse in the course of long, grueling flashbacks, and do they conclude that they’re living in a Jonathan Franzen novel? This raises all manner of ethical questions that I will leave to others.

Rather than any measured objections to online activism as currently practiced or the social-networking culture, we’re treated instead to a moving meditation on how the Internet is a totalitarian system comparable to East Germany under the Stasi or the Soviets under Stalin. The gurus of the information-technology field—the “New Regime,” as Franzen calls them—are very much the natural heirs to the politburo. Oh, there are a few differences here and there, of course: “But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking—a relative term in my case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, or worse of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged—the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example.”

So, at least in the sense that these wacky Internet people lack the moral authority conferred upon the Bolsheviks by virtue of risk, this, uh, otherwise useful comparison between the start-up crowd and the Stalinists does perhaps break down a little. But! But! It gathers new strength insomuch that “the most successful of them” often have recourse to terror, in this case the “terrors of technocracy,” which consist of “the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.” So, there you go.

• • •

Just a page later, Franzen inexplicably switches gears and decides that the terrors of technology instead consist of “the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA—it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them.” Setting aside the demonstrably false and frankly bizarre claim that recent concerns over the intelligence community’s unprecedented capabilities stem merely from some sort of clever gambit by tech firm CEOs who must resort to falsely “imputing” such things rather than, say, from documented and ongoing revelations about those agencies, it’s hard to see how Franzen can actually believe that the misuse of personal information by powerful corporations should logically preclude “smart people” from also fearing the NSA, as their “less-smart” counterparts have been “persuaded” to do. It’s likewise difficult to see how Franzen can be entirely unaware of the contention that’s been put forth over and over again by many of the very people who have made sacrifices to bring these matters to attention—that we are concerned with the combination of state and corporate power exercised in secret, drawing upon advanced and little-known information technology, wielded in such a way as to narrow further and further the potential for truly private life while also contaminating the very information flow that a citizenry requires if it is to survive above the level of a subject population, defended by an opaque protocol of deception and retaliation, and aided and abetted by a dysfunctional establishment culture that was unequipped to even discover the problem without a great deal of help from outside that establishment, which has nonetheless studiously refrained from learning any lessons from all of this.

There’s an old joke which holds that in heaven, the cooks are French, the cops are English, and the engineers are German; whereas in hell, the cooks are English, the cops are German, and the engineers are French. We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one. Franzen’s nightmare—a new regime of technology and information activists that will challenge the senile culture of which he is so perfectly representative—is exactly what is needed.